When I was younger, I would occasionally get irritated waiting in line at a cash register while an older citizen sorted through a handful of coins to pay the exact amount. After all, it was faster to pay with notes and let the cashier – who had the various coins in a conveniently-arranged tray – handle the change. Why didn’t they do what everyone else did?

Now that I’m a bit older, I know why: after a couple of decades of dumping handfuls of change into a bowl on their dresser, they’ve accumulated approximately 3.94 metric tonnes of coins, and they’ll be damned if they’ll sit down to roll it all up and haul it to the bank.

I happened to be an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario when John Palmer wrote his "Ban the Penny" article, and it made sense to me. Of course, it makes even more sense to get rid of nickels while you’re at it, and he’s expanded his campaign.

I was thinking about this when I was in London last summer. Now, dealing with coins in a currency you’ve never used before is always going to require a bit of getting used to. But it seems to me as though the British have chosen to make it extra difficult: they have 8 – count ’em – eight different coins.

Now, inertia is almost certainly to blame, and since the UK is an older country than Canada, it’s probably even more difficult to make changes – although they did finally decimalise their currency in 1971.

But what I don’t understand is why the people who set up the euro also chose to use 8 coins. I mean, they were starting from scratch: no history, no "save the charmingly-nicknamed-but-completely-worthless-coin" pressure groups. And they went out and made it insanely complicated. Whatever for?